Unhacked HR10-250 - Partitions gone!

[batchman]

First the background: My DirecTivo had been acting funny and suddenly died. Unfortunately, this happened while I was out of town and my wife followed DirecTv's directions to clear out the system. I have no idea what steps she followed.

So now, the DirecTivo will reboot and says something about clearing the play list and then reboots after 30 seconds or so.

Obviously something is wrong with the hard drive so I pulled it and am running SpinRite to "fix" the drive. SpinRite reported that the drive had no partition table. Hmmm... that doesn't seem right!

Now my questions:
1. Can I copy someone else's HR10-250 hard drive to another 250GB hard drive, drop it in and go? Basically, I want to know if there my friend's service/customer numbers will be transferred to. I don't want to steal the service, I want *my* service with his partitions and data.
2. Can an HR10-250 start with a blank hard drive? If DirectTV's employees had my wife do something that wiped the drive, there has to be a reason.
3. My HDMI card died. Can anyone suggest a parts source?

[cheer]

SpinRite reported that the drive had no partition table. Hmmm... that doesn't seem right!
It's more likely that SpinRite doesn't recognize the partition table. Then again, if the drive is failing, anything is possible.
1. Can I copy someone else's HR10-250 hard drive to another 250GB hard drive, drop it in and go? Basically, I want to know if there my friend's service/customer numbers will be transferred to. I don't want to steal the service, I want *my* service with his partitions and data.
It's possible. You might get an Error 51; if so, do a Clear and Delete Everything. You won't have your friend's recordings, of course.
2. Can an HR10-250 start with a blank hard drive? If DirectTV's employees had my wife do something that wiped the drive, there has to be a reason.
No. Odds are they had her do a Clear and Delete Everything, which erases recordings, scheduled stuff, guide data, season passes, and the like.
3. My HDMI card died. Can anyone suggest a parts source?
Can't help you there.

--chris

[captain_video]

You didn't mention which version of SpinRite you are using. I'm not sure if older versions will recognize Tivo partitions but the latest release (version 6) will.

I don't know of any sources for the HDMI card right offhand. You could try Weaknees but they'd probably want your left nut to pay for it. If you have the DTV service contract they'll replace the entire unit for you, no questions asked (well, not exactly; they'll make you talk to a technician to confirm that a replacement is necessary).

I've had two DTivos replaced under the service contact so far (one standard DTivo and one HD model) so it's worth the $7.99/month IMO. I believe you're locked into the service contract for 12 months and you can't report any claims for the first 30 days but after that you're home free. You can sign up for it at any time so if you can use the component outputs on the HDTivo in the meantime you may want to consider getting the service contract and then exchange the unit after a month for another one. Chances are it will be a refurbished unit but yours is already used anyway.

[batchman]

I am using Spinrite 6 so I am 5 9's sure that the partition table got screwed.

I am going to let it finish analyzing the drive before I copy another one onto it.

Here is something new... Spinrite was running great and should have finished by now but it suddenly slowed down once it got to around cylinder 2700. Now it is taking 10 times as long to read and re-write the sectors.

No errors have been reported but the slow down on the outer sectors is concerning me. The problem is that I don't have a replacement drive and lack the $$$'s to buy a new drive. (layoffs suck)

If things don't work out then I'll swap out with DirecTV. They offered a replacement for $15 shipping but I have to resignup for a 2 year contract.

Thanks to Cheear and captain_video for their responses. :-)

[cheer]

I had a drive (not a Tivo drive but still) do exactly the same thing. Hit a certain cylinder and just slowed to a crawl -- even by Spinrite standards. I let it run for three days before I punted. The drive was clearly dead; replaced it with a new one and all was well.

[batchman]

I got one recovered sector. None other were found bad.

What goes on the outer partitions? If the last partition is used for video then I won't run into problems until I start filling up the Tivo. (work around!)

[batchman]

I finally got around to buying a replacement hard drive. Partition magic still shows no partitions on the hard drive. I booted the PM cd to copy one drive to another but it won't copy a blank drive (as far as it is concerned).

I will post a new thread. Maybe someone can help with this.

[captain_video]

Partition Magic won't work with a Tivo drive in any way, shape, or form. Trying to copy a Tivo drive partition using PM is a total waste of time. Use MFS Tools or a Linux distribution with dd to copy partitions. Stop screwing around with methods that simply won't work.